Senior System Tests & Diagnostics Engineer

Graphcore•Austin, TX

About The Position

Graphcore is seeking a System Tests & Diagnostics Engineer to develop, extend, and integrate silicon validation and diagnostics tools for next-generation AI systems. The role extends existing Arm-developed diagnostics technologies to support Graphcore AI silicon and builds Graphcore-specific capabilities for future hardware. It focuses on creating diagnostic software and stress tools that expose hardware failures, characterize silicon behavior, and improve platform observability throughout bring-up and validation. The engineer will develop system-level diagnostics and stress tools within an existing framework to detect data integrity, computational correctness, performance, and reliability issues across CPUs, AI accelerators, memory, storage, PCIe, firmware, BMC, and other platform components. Examples include silent data corruption tests, power transient stress tools, and platform diagnostics. The work includes close collaboration with hardware architects, firmware engineers, validation engineers, and diagnostics teams, translating emerging hardware capabilities into reusable diagnostic software. This position offers the opportunity to work across hardware architecture, diagnostics, and software engineering, with work that influences hardware quality, silicon bring-up, and long-term platform reliability for future AI infrastructure.

Requirements

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
Experience developing hardware diagnostics, system validation software, firmware validation tools, or low-level systems software.
Strong software development skills in Python and C/C++.
Strong Linux systems experience.
Strong understanding of modern server platform architecture, including how CPU, memory, PCIe, storage, networking, firmware, operating systems, and device drivers interact.
Experience debugging hardware/software interactions across multiple platform layers.
Experience developing diagnostics, stress testing, or hardware validation software.
Experience with server platforms, embedded systems, or SoC validation.
Strong analytical and debugging skills.
Experience collaborating across hardware, firmware, software, and validation teams.
Excellent communication and problem-solving skills.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Arm-based server platforms.
Experience with AI accelerators or high-performance computing systems.
Experience with Silent Data Corruption (SDC) testing.
Experience with hardware stress testing.
Experience with power transient analysis.
Experience with hardware fault-injection methodologies.
Experience with firmware validation.
Experience with silicon bring-up.
Experience with performance characterization.
Experience with hardware telemetry and observability.
Experience with BMC firmware or server management.
Experience with RAS (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability) technologies.
Experience validating CPU scaling and cache behavior.
Experience validating memory (DDR/HBM) bandwidth, latency, and NUMA effects.
Experience validating interconnect contention under multi-core load.
Experience validating PCIe/I-O throughput, latency, and multi-device scenarios.
Experience with high-speed I/O validation.

Responsibilities

Learn and extend existing Arm diagnostics tools to support Graphcore’s AI platform.
Develop specialized diagnostics and stress-testing software for CPU, memory, interconnect, PCIe, and other system components.
Build reusable validation utilities that integrate into the existing validation framework.
Develop tools that expose intermittent hardware failures, including silent data corruption, timing-related issues, and hardware instability.
Design configurable diagnostic applications supporting multiple silicon revisions, platforms, and execution environments.
Develop automation for executing diagnostics across server and rack-scale validation environments.
Design configuration-driven diagnostics supporting scalable parameterization and workload variation.
Collaborate with hardware architects to understand new hardware capabilities and identify missing diagnostics.
Work with firmware and validation teams to improve hardware observability.
Debug low-level hardware, firmware, operating system, and driver interactions.
Analyze diagnostic output and improve fault-isolation methodologies.
Develop software that enables engineers to reproduce and investigate difficult hardware failures.
Contribute reusable libraries and utilities that improve engineering productivity across multiple validation teams.